THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: RIGHT OR WRONG?

History has never been easy for the French. It has, for them, probably more than for any other European people, produced a mix of exultation and anguish. Ninety-nine years ago, the French celebrated the 100th anniversary of the beginning of their great Revolution of 1789, and, by a rather extraordinary coincidence, they did so only a couple of years after inaugurating for the first time a permanently republican form of government, finishing a century-long alternation between monarchy and anarchy. The moment was full of exultation. Hope and confidence in the future prevailed. The principles of 1789, the rights of man and citizen and the concept of constitutional law, seemed finally to have been embodied in government. An Exposition Universelle was held, attracting more than 25 million paying entrants, whose centerpiece was Gustave Eiffel's extraordinary tower, in itself an awesome symbol of the belief in the perfectibility of man through reason, science and democracy.

To be sure, mingling with the triumphalism of the newly empowered republicans were discordant notes, sharp strains of anguish and opposition. Hippolyte Taine, as the French historian Pascal Ory has pointed out in a collection of volumes entitled ''Les Lieux de la Memoire'' (''The Places of Memory''), was publishing his antirevolutionary ''Origins-of Contemporary France'' in those years. Church figures railed against the revolution as Antichrist. The Republic was still shaky. Its enemies -clerics, monarchists, antiparliamentary demagogues - were out in force. But perhaps because the Republic was perceived to be fragile, or, at least, wondrous, certainly long awaited, the popular mood was weighted heavily in favor of the richness of memory. The official will, the French historian Mona Ozouf has written, ''was to drown the celebration in the ocean of a Universal Exposition.'' Mr. Ory cites a contemporary commentator, Charles-Louis Chassin, a self-conscious counterweight to Taine, proclaiming that the centennial showed ''the legitimacy of the demands of our fathers.'' Another century has rolled by now. The French will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Revolution next year facing a kind of paradox.

The danger to the Republic has long since passed. The classic right has, at long last, appropriated the Revolution as its own, admitting it as the founding act of modern France whose underlying principles can never be repudiated. The left has lost its monopoly on that notion, thereby justifying the historian Francois Furet's observation of several years ago that, after nearly two centuries, ''the Revolution is over.'' It is no longer the centerpiece of France's political struggles.

And yet perhaps the very absence of any real threat to the Republic has encouraged a mood of ambivalence over the looming bicentennial. The revolution is generally perceived to have created a nation ''coupe en deux,'' cut into two irreconcilable parts, thereby giving French history its special whiff of the unreasonable, its taste of conflict, insurrection, class antagonism. It took most of these two centuries for the French to heal the wounds. And so it is odd that just now, when the country is more united than at any time since 1789, more governed from the political center, it has fallen into a political and scholarly quarrelsomeness over the revolution.

It is said in Paris these days that one of President Francois Mitterrand's minor purposes in declaring himself a candidate for the second presidential term he won in May was to be in office to deliver the address next year on July 14, when the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille will be celebrated. The President's Socialist Party and many others wanted to consecrate the Revolution as the Great National Event, to fuse it conceptually with the nation itself. Indeed, Mr. Mitterrand hoped to mark the bicentennial with a second Exposition Universelle. But there was too much opposition to that idea for it to survive, too much of a sense that the Revolution, which produced the Terror and the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, and then the Empire - not to mention nearly two centuries of a country ''coupe en deux'' - was worthy less of celebration than deep and sober reflection. And so, at the moment, no World's Fair is being planned. Meanwhile, new articles and books - there are 200 titles announced for publication in the next year - have contained the elements of the struggle for interpretation over what the event represented for France and the world.

The polemic centers around a very old and fundamental issue that can be put in the simplest, starkest terms: was the Revolution, on balance, good or bad? For, if it started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and included the Constitution of 1793, which embodied the principles of freedom and equality before the law, it also gave birth to fundamental conflicts that, in turn, produced a familiar problem: was it appropriate to violate the newborn principles of the Revolution to defeat counterrevolutionaries? And, who, in any case, was a counterrevolutionary? The Terror of 1793, consciously implemented by the Committee of Public Safety, whose guiding figure was Maximilien Robespierre, answered in the affirmative. The ''revolutionary government'' must ''act like a thunderbolt,'' Robespierre said. After what was viewed as the counterrevolution (a term that was to have a rich history in later decades) threatened to gain the upper hand in March of that year in the region of western France known as the Vendee, tens of thousands were massacred by both sides. Did the establishment of the principles vindicate what Mr. Furet called the derapage - the skid - into chaos? Was the derapage inevitable? Those are the questions.

As the French grapple with them, two themes stand out. On the one hand, the French are examining not merely the Revolution but the history of the history of the Revolution, looking back on the way the event has been used and misused by past generations of scholars and writers, as if to stress that the great divide of French history has always divided the French. Second, if a few general lines can be discerned in recent publications, there has been a resurgence of a powerfully skeptical mood about the Revolution, of a post-revisionist school of thought with echoes of Taine and other antirevolutionary interpreters. To the great anger of those more inclined to praise the event than to discredit it, that very charged word, genocide, has been applied to the bloodshed of the Revolution, which its enemies see not as the inaugural blow of freedom but as a grim historical precedent, an ideologically motivated attempt to annihilate an entire class of people.

Magazine covers reflect the national ambivalence. ''La France Divisee, la Fete Menacee'' (''France Divided, the Celebration in Danger'') -was already last year the cover story of Lire, the country's most widely read literary magazine. ''Is it possible to celebrate the French Revolution?'' Ms. Ozouf, the author of ''La Fete Revolutionnaire'' (''The Revolutionary Celebration''), asks in the pages of Le Debat, a highbrow quarterly edited by Pierre Nora, chief nonfiction editor at Gallimard. Ms. Ozouf's answer is that commemoration is ''difficult.'' It would lead precisely to the sorts of discoveries and divisions that make celebration impossible. ''The discordancies of the event,'' she writes, ''would render into two the history of France and also the French themselves.''

''Should we be afraid of 1989?,'' responded Pierre Agulhon, another major historian of the Revolution, writing also in the pages of Le Debat. ''Can one plead reasonably here for a commemoration without being taken for an idiot, a Stalinist, or an official spokesman?'' he asked. He then went on to make just such a plea, proclaiming as justification ''the positive correlation between liberty and the Revolution.''

''You don't have to be a great expert in the history of France to know that the successive stages of freedom and democracy are owed to the men, the groups and the regimes who laid claim to 1789,'' Mr. Agulhon wrote. ''Each time, by contrast - and this is proof in contrario - that freedom and democracy were excluded from France, or suffered reversals or threats, it was because power was held by the declared enemies of the principles of the Revolution.''

Something odd has happened in the last five years, Mr. Nora said. ''For the first time, we were just at the point where the history of the revolution could be written not by militants but by historians. And yet, perhaps because of the resurgence of the extreme right, there has been a bizarre resistance to the revolution, an unanticipated return of the counterrevolutionary repressed. The left-right split that we thought had been buried has now come alive again.''

Perhaps the most anticipated book of the year provides the background for this. It is ''Dictionnaire Critique de la Revolution Francaise'' (''A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution''), to be published by Gallimard later this year. The book, edited by Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, has a symbolic value because Mr. Furet is generally perceived to be the leading figure in what has been for nearly two decades the dominant school of interpretation, one that removed the Revolution from the rosy and apologetic embrace of the Marxist left and turned it back into the hands of apolitical neutrality and moderation. Indeed, as Mr. Furet himself points out in one of the essays in the dictionary, for much of the century the interpretation of the French Revolution was dominated by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which ''illustrated the necessity of the dictatorship and of the terror.'' A sign of the Marxists' domination, exercised earlier in the century by such figures as Albert Mathiez and Albert Soboul, was the replacement of Danton, the republican figure lionized by the prorevolutionary 19th-century historians, by Robespierre and the Montagnards, who ushered in the Terror of 1793, as the heroes of the event. Not surprisingly, the Terror bears more than a coincidental similarity to the Stalinist terror of the 1930's.

''And so,'' Mr. Furet says, ''the mechanisms by which the Revolution and its heroes are identified with present events operated as much on the historians of the 20th century as on those of the 19th.'' Mathiez read back into the French Revolution what he saw as the tribulations of the Russian one, claiming Jacobinism and Bolshevism to be ''two dictatorships born of the civil war and the foreign war'' and ''having an identical aim, the transformation of society.'' Mathiez, admired by Mr. Furet for carrying out the first major study of social classes in the Revolution, is nonetheless criticized for using documents ''in the fashion of a lawyer, in order to demonstrate what he already knows.'' The basic thrust of the Marxist historians, in any case, was to treat the Revolution as a whole - ''La Revolution est un bloc,'' Clemenceau once said -seeing the Terror as justified by the Revolution's ends, as made necessary by the ferocity of the counterrevolution.

It is this point of view - the romantic and very French belief in the purifying effects of acts of revolutionary violence - that Mr. Furet has combated in his own work, particularly, ''Penser la Revolution Francaise,'' published in 1981 by Oxford University Press under the title ''Interpreting the French Revolution.'' Mr. Nora calls that work ''a vast liquidation of the entire manner of thinking of the Marxists, which was so deeply embedded in the academic culture that historians dealt with the revolution in a Marxist manner without knowing that they were Marxists.'' Mr. Furet saw in the Revolution the advent of democracy in France, its birth amid deep contradictions, but the difficulties were so great and divisive that it took a century for its basic ideas to become facts. He compared the

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French revolution unfavorably to the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 as models of social development, arguing, somewhat in the fashion of Edmund Burke, that it disconnected France from its historic roots. So, while the Marxists had excused the violence of 1791-94, Mr. Furet and what came to be called the revisionist school saw the headlong slide into the Terror, the massacres of the Revolution's prisoners in September 1792, the bloody civil war in the Vendee and the Dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety as tragic and unnecessary. Moreover, while the Marxists had attributed the derapage, to the gathering forces of reaction, the plotting of emigres and the schemes of Prussia and England, Mr. Furet saw it as an interior product, the unleashing of conflicts among French classes and sects.

''The English and the American Revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries conserved their religious attachments and their historical continuity,'' Mr. Furet wrote in a recent essay, contributing to the renewed current debate. ''Hence their extraordinary consensual force.'' By contrast, he goes on, ''the French Revolution broke at the same time with the Catholic Church and with the monarchy - that is, with religion and with history. It wanted to found society, to create the revolutionary man, but on the basis of what? It had neither Moses nor Washington, nobody and nothing on which to fix its rudder.''

In a new and controversial book, ''Le Genocide Franco-Francais: La Vendee-Venge'' (''The Franco-French Genocide: The Vendee Avenged''), published by Presses Universitaires de France, a young historian, Reynald Secher, takes some of the elements of the revisionist school and transforms them into a counterrevolutionary diatribe. Mr. Secher, a protege of Pierre Chaunu, the dean of the current antirevolutionary school, examines a single commune in the region of western France that in 1793 saw one of the most horrific outbreaks of fraternal violence in European history. But whereas numerous volumes have in the past examined the massacres in the Vendee as a conflict between ''patriotic'' revolutionary forces and those of the counterrevolution, Mr. Secher sees in the violence a kind of precursor to the absolute ruthlessness of 20th-century totalitarianism.

From the outset, Mr. Secher notes, the events of 1789 were welcomed in the Vendee, both by the local peasantry and by the clergy; however, by 1791 the mood had turned sour, local incidents multiplied and Jacobin attacks on priests - who rejected the effective nationalization of the church in 1790 and refused to take the mandatory oath of fealty to the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy - produced a guerrilla war. In the end, using a host of charts and maps, Mr. Secher estimates that a minimum of 15 percent of the Vendean population of about 800,000 was massacred in the nine months of the insurrection. But what is more thematically important and what gives this work its quality of portent for the 20th century, Mr. Secher spurns the notion that the massacres were the inevitable product of the ferocity of civil conflicts. They were ''premeditated massacres,'' he says; they were ''organized, planned, committed in cold blood, massive and systematic, undertaken with the conscious and proclaimed will to destroy a well-defined region, and to exterminate an entire people . . . in order to extirpate a 'cursed race' judged ideologically unredeemable.'' The Vendee, in other words, was the first ideological crime, history's first instance of utopianism gone wild.

Mr. Secher's is far from the only look at the darkest side of the Revolution. Rene Sedillot, in ''Le Cout de la Revolution Francaise'' (''The Cost of the French Revolution''), estimates that two million deaths occurred because of revolutionary violence and social dislocation. Jean-Francois Fayard, one of the co-authors of a forthcoming dictionary of the revolution (a rival to the Furet-Ozouf volume) has written ''La Justice Revolutionnaire: Chronique de la Terreur'' (''Revolutionary Justice: A Chronicle of the Terror''), examining 400 cases judged between 1792 and 1795, the period when the very guarantees enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man were suspended and the guillotine was used for some 17,000 executions.

Surprisingly, these works have not been met by an equally energetic response by the Revolution's defenders. It is as though the left, from whose camp the defenders have traditionally come, has held sway for so long that it has become a bit complacent. Nonetheless, one well-known figure from the Socialist Party, Max Gallo, a novelist and biographer who was once Mr. Mitterrand's official spokesman, made a stir with the publication of a slender volume entitled ''Lettre Ouverte a Maximilien Robespierre sur les Nouveaux Muscadins'' (''An Open Letter to Maximilien Robespierre on the New Dandies'') - the muscadins were the elegant, foppish royalists of the revolutionary era who pursued the Jacobins after Robespierre's fall.

Mr. Gallo's ''Letter,'' more cri de coeur than scholarly contribution, aims its sharpest thrusts at the argument that the Terror and dictatorship of 1793 led eventually to the Gulag Archipelago. Mr. Gallo asks for a ''detached and lucid'' examination of the Revolution, one free of partisan thrusts and ulterior motives. The concept of the revolution as the world's first ''ideological genocide'' not only puts 1789 on trial, he argues, it ''calls into question the very spirit of the Republic.''

The Revolution was attacked by the counterrevolution, which caused its derapage, Mr. Gallo argues, but it also invented the concept of the rights of man and, in any case, was made by ''men and women sharing the hope - sometimes illusory and always fragile - for bread a little less expensive, for some time away from daily labor, to live a little more freely.''

There are more sober, less politically anguished, efforts to deal with the perennial questions about the French Revolution than this. ''La Revolution en Questions'' (''The Revolution in Questions'') by Jacques Sole, published by Seuil, enumerates the questions that have stirred the passions of the French and others for 200 years and attempts to elucidate them in light of the latest scholarship. Mr. Sole, a professor of history at the University of Grenoble, is less driven by ideological passions than either Mr. Gallo or his antirevolutionary antagonists, and his questions seem the right ones: Could the monarchy have reformed? Was the derapage inevitable? Why did the Revolution end up in the personal dictatorship of Napoleon? Do contemporary revolutions derive from 1789?

Mr. Sole, who expresses a great debt to British and American historians of the French Revolution, does not treat the derapage as inevitable; like Francois Furet, he sees it as the tragic result of perhaps unavoidable mistakes. The church, for example, the center of opposition to the Revolution in the Vendee, was not actually hostile to the Revolution in the beginning. Many bishops and priests had absorbed the lessons of the philosophes and, while hostile to the overt anticlericalism of some 18th-century figures, particularly Voltaire, were as fervent about that new concept, the rights of man, and as opposed to manorial rights as the early Jacobins were. But, as Mr. Sole puts it, the clergy ''did not intend to put into question the central role of their institution in national life.'' The great divide came when the church was put under state control in 1790. ''This political disaster,'' Mr. Sole writes, ''inevitably transformed itself into a permanent source of disorder.'' The importance of religious attachments in places like the Vendee were reflected in the antirevolutionary uprising there, led by a clergy far better rooted in the local area than were the revolutionary bureaucrats.

No doubt the agony and the discomfort, the sense both of richness and ambiguity produced by the Revolution, will remain even after Mr. Sole's effort to resolve the main problems. Aware that the debate will continue, he does emphasize one element of historical certainty, a matter of definition for later generations. The word ''revolution'' was first used in its modern sense at the end of 1789 by the French, who meant by it something that went beyond a mere coup d'etat, a change of rulers. It was, as Mr. Sole puts it, ''a mass uprising aimed at transforming society.'' There, perhaps, is what gives 1789 both its main link with the 20th century and its universalist, polemical thrust.

The point is that if the French created the world's first revolution (in the new, 1789 sense of the word), they also invented the moral anguish that surrounded it then and still does. It is worth noting these days that the Soviet people, basking in relative openness, have been reconsidering Stalin and Bukharin and even Lenin, just as the French have been reflecting on Danton and Robespierre. The underlying issue is the same in both cases. Can there be revolution without derapage, without the guillotine or the gulag? It is a measure of its gravity and difficulty that 200 years later, that question is among the few remaining things that still cut the French in two.

Correction:

Sunday, Late City Final Edition An essay on July 10 about the bicentennial of the French Revolution misidentified the French publisher of the Dictionnaire Critique de la Revolution Francaise. Flammarion is publishing the book this month.

Richard Bernstein, a former chief of The Times's Paris bureau, is now a national correspondent for The Times.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 1988, on Page 7007001 of the National edition with the headline: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: RIGHT OR WRONG?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe